Wolf Food

Sunday, May 23, 2004

Free today -- PAID HOME. Just one of the panels of only one of the ca. 3000 pages of the sketchbooks Donna Barr did before she was ever published.*

In this episode, Jahnhalt shows up with snow-roses. And apologies. And cheeks and lips just glowing from the cold.

And uses the German word "scharf."

(This was added because another post list had been discussing some German porn spam that included the word "rattenscharf.")

*A lot of 'em full color, up to 2000 words on a page, and a lot of the dialogue in another language. Now THAT's a 24-hour comic (well, a 7-YEAR comic). And this doesn't count the thousands of pages she burned cuz she didn't think they were good enough.

The moral? Get the art out of the artists' hands before it's too late. Swap it, beg for it, even -- gasp! -- BUY it! before it disappears in anything from a flurry of moving to fung shei to mourning to cat pee to a bad fit of Chuplik).

I need to explain Chuplik:

It's a Mojave word, meaning "thrown away," and refers to the grave goods burned at a funeral. The Mojave, according to the book "Crazy Weather," responded to stress by throwing things away, getting the material goods out of their lives.

I've suffered from it all my life. I've thrown away books, things I loved, even people and animals. Cats have come this close to being put to sleep because I thought they couldn't stand a move. And oh, the regret. Chuplik was meant for when you were about to die. A Death Song of things. It was never meant to infect an entire life.

If I've ever driven you away, said I didn't have time, or just RUN -- I was probably Chuplik. If I've slammed a door in your face, or refused to help you, blame Chuplik. And believe me, I've regretted that, too.

There's a reason I'm Chuplik, but that's a family thang.

You don't wanna know.

Robert Crumb once told me I was weird. Well, Bobby, it comes from the family background. And I can match weird family with anybody.

Every single time, a woman or a gay man who gets angry at me -- they think I'm going to take over their herd! And that's why the fight results. I've never been able to understand why they get so -- well -- fearfully angry. The kind of anger based in terror. I mean, it's not just minor screw-ups (we all make those, and I sure make my share). They take it as an opportunity to run me away from their herd, if they can, although that doesn't happen very often. They have fits, absolutely get their backs up. Over -- well, over nothing. I've finally sussed it. Call me stupid for taking so long.

They think I'm going to take their herd!

HOW can you tell people you don't want their herd -- you're perfectly happy to be the harmless rough rogue nag that wanders about from herd to herd and scratches rumps with everybody? Who shares grass and water when she finds it with whatever herd she happens to be grazing with? Gets a kick out of a little head-slamming and play-fighting? Snaps at the colts, but kicks any mountain lion that tries to take 'em (even romps a little with 'em if nobody's watching). Without making boss mares and stallions think you're running down their herd? How do you tell somebody you don't want something without making them think you are looking down your nose at it?

It's like trying to tell someone you aren't fooling around with their mate because -- well, you don't want their mate. You know what would happen. They'd get this pained look, and snap, "So what's WRONG with George? Suzy? Billy?" With the assumption that if there is anything wrong with their choice, there is something wrong with them for making it? And then you have to tell them that nothing's wrong with the boy, but you just don't want him. Oh, yeah, get yourself out of that little maelstrom.

And so often, that's just the problem. The herd is so small, and so limited in outlook, or so afraid of something -- words, contacts, expressions, ideas -- that you don't want it. It would never occur to you. It bores you, and you wander off to less constricted pastures. Off into Left Field, where you live.

I've picked up a new buddy up here in Clallam Bay -- Call her T. She has always had the same problems I have. She's been accused of ADD. She can't sit still. She can't stop talking. She can't stop bouncing ideas off the wall. And yesterday, at a Council meeting at the new Community Center in Sekiu, she and I and M. -- a local artist, and another rough rogue mare -- went nuts at a blackboard, laughing our fool heads off at an imaginary pontoon project that would solve the bridge problem up here. Yes, we came up with terms like "PosPonification." "Pontoon Meisters." Even "Kalakatoon." (Google "Kalakala" and see why that was so funny. But you probably hadda be there).

Were we hurting anybody? Were we threatening anybody? We were off on our own end of the hall, having fun in our own -- well, NOT quiet way -- and the local boss mare went a little peculiar at the subsequent meeting. Making constant comments about my talking too much, and little put-downs. But what did I want with her herd? It's just the local Town Council. Anybody can wander in and out of that. Why would anybody be afraid you'd take it away?

T. and I were in her car later, complaining about the whole problem of having other people tell us to shut up. We're usually not even talking to these people. We're entertaining ourselves. We're even trying to help out. You know what we get told?

"You think too fast."

Yup. They can't keep up with us, and WE're the problem. We have more RAM or bits and better hyperlinking, and WE're the obsolete machines.

I have another fast-brained friend who has been told, "You're so stupid! I can't understand anything you say!"

You know, lately, people have been doing things like developing a third set of teeth. Or wisdom teeth have been disappearing.

People are also developing more empathy. And they're thinking faster.

I had semi-antique wisdom teeth (good roots, bad crowns), but I think my brain is next generation. The kids they're calling ADD, or who make the connections too fast are just the way it's going to be.

Stop drugging us. Stop telling us to shut up. We may be the future.

And those of you with slower motherboards are just going to have to be darn grateful that the faster brain comes more empathy. We're NICER than the slow brains. Kinder. Gentler. More able to see the consequences of our actions. Our logic is complicated and inter-connected. You're not going to get it, and don't try. But do NOT be afraid of us.

Tuesday, May 18, 2004

See the date on this? This is the article I meant, when I said I'd put one up that was back when I was being polite.

"American Brave
11/9/01

On National Public Radio, a young Marine was talking confidently about how well he would be able to fulfill his combat mission in Afghanistan.

He was quite assured that he would be able to stand up to the requirements, not only of personal bravery and toughness, but of the need to accept “collateral damage,” if it was necessary to fulfill his mission. He had no doubt that he would have the steely courage of mind to kill civilians if it was expected of him. Including children, if by this immoral means he arrived at a moral goal.

The young Marine’s tone was very pure and upright and cavalier, and I realized where I’d heard it before.

I was listening to a young man speak about what would happen if his country were ever invaded. He was quite sure that, if the enemy were parachuting into town, he would kill his own children, to prevent their falling into enemy hands. When I said that he would first have to get through his wife to kill them, he brightly assured me that she would have already died, at his hands, in her sleep.

We will not go into the inconsistencies of this young man’s battle plan. Do I need to say that he is, of course, neither married nor a father? So these are all hypothetical mercy
killings, upon a hypothetical mate and imaginary offspring. He was still at that stage in a young man’s life when he thinks of his woman and his kids as his property, and cannot conceive of their existing without him. And believes that this proves his own sense of responsibility. We’ve seen where this leads when a man or a woman decides that it would be better for their babies to be shot or drowned.

I pointed out that his wife, if she followed the pattern of the millions of women who have survived invasions, would probably recover from the rape and brutality and continue her life with a great store of resilience and tough-mindedness. Her misery would be her own, and it would be up to her to decide whether to survive it or not. The children would be able to live in the rubble, if it came to that, and survive in the recovery of the economy. Of course, they could both succumb horribly, but it wasn’t up to their husband or father to cut short any chances they would have for a future, simply because he couldn’t bear the thought that they would be without him.

I could see that the ability of wife and children to exist without him was a new idea to my young friend. And the young Marine would no more be able to picture the reality of killing a child.

During World War Two, those soldiers of the Axis powers who were required to kill civilians, for one reason or another, often suffered psychological damage for their actions. An SS-man, under orders, shot a young Jewish girl, and became a manic-depressive for the rest of his life. In the end, the Third Reich even had to come up with more “humane” -- their word, not mine -- methods for carrying out their mission of wiping out their unwanted populations, because their individual soldiers could not be entrusted with the job, in the numbers required.

There were others who felt no guilt at all. They believed in their mission. They believed that they were committing immoral acts for the greater moral good. Regardless of how these acts might be viewed by us now, the perpetrators more often were convinced of their own decency, and of their own acceptance of a tough task, than merely indulging their brutality. Human beings really do want to be accepted by their societies as decent, upstanding, proper people. In the long run, those people who were convinced of the decency of their acts were much harder to convince, if at all, that those acts had been evil or misguided. The very misery they themselves had suffered during the conflict required them to continue to believe in the worth of their own sacrifices. They dug in the heels of their consciences, and refused to change their minds. As Confederate soldiers sang after the Civil War, "I won't be reconstructed, and I do not give a damn."

The young Marine who is convinced he can kill and not be affected by it may very well be right. If he believes in the righteousness of his campaign, he may very well be able to shoot that young girl because he believes she is carrying a grenade. He may be able to kill a woman because he believes she is harboring the enemy. His beliefs may lead him to all manner of heinous acts.

So how do you want that Marine to view those acts in the end? As though he were a moral, upright man, fulfilling the duty demanded of him by his place in his society? Or would you rather than he was revolted by what he had done, and betrayed that duty by refusing to accept the rightness of it, until it ate away at him like a hungry ghost, and he ended up a manic-depressive the rest of his life?

The Navajo, when they sent a young man out to war, magically changed him into a Warrior – a non-human, an unclean thing, a kind of killing robot, a murderous Mudman, a Golem. What this Thing did, it did for its people. When it returned from battle, it was not allowed back among its people until it had been cleansed, and magically transformed back into a human being.

Our people doesn't debrief our young soldiers. They do what they do in a single personality. When they get back, if they are still unclean, they have to wallow in their own perceived heart-filth, their own fault, and their own responsibility.

The internet connection was acting up, and the support line was busy, so obviously it was the server, and not my email program. And my computer stops me when I'm going to start naming names, so be very very happy that Aunt Mary Frankenstein got it into her motherboard not to let me come after the human race with a verbal shotgun.

And parents don't want their children reading this, because like the rest of America (and if you're not, well, lucky you, go ahead and brag about it) they're totally hung up on language and actually believe that somehow, like a magic spell, words will twist the minds of their helpless spawn. I am being cordial enough to appreciate they might be that stupid, and warning them ahead of time. Fucking nation of Harry Potters, that's what we are. We believe in the Voodoo of the Dictionary. What, some words are like a virus or something?

Shit, parents stick food in their spawn's mouth that contains growth hormones and livestock antibiotics and fricking the remainders of ROUNDUP, and they're talking to ME about what I may stick in their kids' ears or put before their kids' eyes? They can get back to me when they stop buying feed-lot beef, the hypocrites. They don't care about their damn kids. Kids just give them an excuse to be Behavior Nazis. Go ahead, mommy and daddy, take them on airplanes as babelets while they scream with the agony of having their tiny fragile eardrums blown out by badly-pressurized cabins, so the parentals can go show little Timmy off to grandma like the numb plastic wind-up dolly they seem to consider him to be. They're all mostly child-abusers, anyway. We wouldn't have had Hitler or Shaka Zulu without them.

I was in a mood this morning. I mean a MOOD. Anybody think that was a mood up there? Oh, Folks, you don't know. I mean the kind of mood that gave me a nose-ring instead of an ear-ring, because things went all to hell while I was off doing errands waiting for the ear-ring and the equipment to autoclave for an hour. Because it was that kind of tattoo parlor, the good kind, where they really care whether or not a customer will come back and trash the place if her septum rots off.

But they should offer psychological help for customers, I'm telling ya, bitch. I got back totally pissed off and pointed at the face of my poor innocent meat-puppet and snapped,"Fuck it. Put it in my nose." And little missy practiced-her-piercing on her own face and ears and nipples and looked it, AND where the hell did she get pink that color for her hair, and it was probably toxic and sinking in -- she just went ahead, told me to take a deep breath, and let it out, and punched the thing through my sweet spot. I'm not blaming her. She just shouldn't be so damned obedient to idiot customers, and if there was ever an idiot customer, it's me. I buy into so much silly crap it would make a donkey blush (Go ahead, picture a blushing donkey. What? Around the nostrils? The ears? The genitalia? Who knows? Is it impossible to embarrass a donkey?).

I mean, I was in a MOOD, mama. I was going to name names. And describe various idiocies. I've never really done it before. Admittedly, there are people out there who have pissed me off, and all they ever heard about it was their face slapped onto a particularly nasty character or two in THE DESERT PEACH, and I quoted them all over the place. Open their nasty mouths around me, will they? Anybody emails me nasty and they're going up on a BLog. People can see what they're really like.

What is it about people? Howl and scream in an email, but then when I hit the BCC Forward button, they're dying of embarrassment. People, if abuse is going to be sent my way, I will share it. I will stand in the village square and point back at our thatched hut and read out abusive behavior to the letter. And with email, stupidity and abuse can spin around the world before the world can. Just ask the Bush administration about that.

America must feel like Anne Scott in "Notting Hill" – "These photos will NEVER go away. No matter what we do, or what we say, every time our name comes up, these photos will show up." Ya gotta love the logo of America we've all just had slipped over our heads in a collective t-shirt. "Hi! I'm an American! I butt-fuck prisoners! I keep slave-girls in Afghanistan!" Thank you very fucking much NOT, Herr Bush, for making it a requirement that I watch my back every single time I get on a plane.

I mean, the things I have put up with. One of my friends -- and my God, I have a few long-suffering, helpful, human friends, if I could bring them sugared grapes on golden platters, I would -- stared at me once and said, "Donna, you put up with an awful lot." I can't even get started on what I've put up with. The things I've seen around me on this planet since I was a kid. I mean, I know the human race is a bunch of stupid monkeys, but HOW stupid can we get?

I mean, do we HAVE to go into a battle and have people shoot at us before we understand that War Is For Stupid People? That all it does it get us and our buddies killed? That it's just a corporate grinder, and we're the meat? We have to be on the front lines, and find a beheaded corpse, and we shoot the people who did it, and then their relatives pull reprisals on us asses, before we realize that people DON't like to be occupied, and they DON't like to be invaded, and they DON't like to be told how to live their lives, any more than we would, and then we finally come home with our head all tangled up because we've discovered -- DISCOVERED! -- that (1) we're mortal and (2) we're being used and (3) THEY don't want us there and they'll kill us until we leave and (4) Civil Wars are going to happen anyway, better sooner than later, because the longer we hold the lid on, the bigger the blow when the pot cracks open and (5) we are going to be fucked up for life, and we will never get over it, and don't kid ourselves and do we really want to? Next time I'll post an essay I wrote back when I was still trying to be nice.

Friday, May 07, 2004

Hm.

On the other list, batting about the idea about what the actual job of the editor is, how about a panel at the San Diego Comicon International:

"The Editor -- It's Not Just Balloon Placement." Too often, the person who becomes the editor has no idea what her or his job really is. Is it really just a personal satrapy to force your personal values on a group of artists? Or do you owe more to the readership? The company? The creators, in-house and/or freelance? Discussions of editorial ethics, positions on legal issues, payments and the actual position of the editor as opposed -- or not? -- to the creators."

(The balloon placement refers to what a group of folks who wanted to be editors thought they'd be doing, when they showed up to a discussion group on the place of editors in the comics industry. Yes, maybe it really IS time for this panel).

More on the actions-of-editors... Again, this is from a list, so it will sound as though it's being addressed to a specific group.

"It's like this thing with Girlamatic. I really I think it was just that Lea hasn't been around so much of the industry -- she's been working with companies that, so she may think it's standard -- rather than being a bad standard. And I've reminded Joey that they'd better get a link to Moderntales and the pages they'd paid to read, up on Girlamatic's home page, because that's no way to treat paying customers.

I'm always a little amazed the way the editors -- who usually produce nothing - act. And how they ignore the customers. I mean, I've always written the way I want, but I try to be kind, polite and helpful to customers - that's part of the deal. Not that I always succeed.

My husband told me to "put her in her place," and I was aghast. I'm not out to "put people in their places." I'm out to raise the level of behavior across the board -- and that includes letting people know that censorship is a BAD thing, and that if the people today have more freedom, it's because people from our time fought for it. We're touchy about it. Hell, Roberta's had her books burned! Admittedly by overworked Customs people, but still...

But you're right, back then, now, the Editor Person so often is thinking only of his/her "powers and prerogatives," and not of the book or the reader -- and certainly not of the creator. They'll pull stuff on you, forget what's important, and when you protest it, you're the Bad Guy.

They'll lie, misquote contracts or re-interpret them, and then you find out you forgot the contract has been automatically inactive for the last year and a half... and they were using it as an argument for their editorial powers. I'm not naming names on that one. My own fault for not digging back through every single damn contract two years after I've signed it.

There's an article on the development of teenage brains in TIME, and the way they act because parts of their heads aren't developed yet. A lot of the symptoms sound the same. Are editors as a class in arrested development?

I'm not talking about you people who DO have fully-developed adult brains, of course."

Thursday, May 06, 2004

Okay, more input, from a friend in France:

"Sent: Thursday, May 06, 2004 6:17 PM
...and I've forgotten: I've read on wolffood the story of the kids and the parents.I agree but I guess that you've forgotten one point. In these times the kids and their parents are uglier and sillier than ever.Sure they are all ugly and silly (bleh),but it's hard to say which one of'em is the winner. -- hervé largeaud"

Well, I said there was a backlash coming. And I don't think we're so pissed at the kids, as at the parents who don't do their job. And how can we in the industrialised west even blame the parents? They're trying to work within the nuclear family -- without the normal primate family structure, in which all relatives help with the kids. It's called the extended family, and it was destroyed in the West by the industrial revolution. It leaves a mother at home with screaming kids, locked in with them, trapped, and she's forced to turn to others outside the family for help and society -- even though those others may not want to help, or have her children as part of her company. Too often, a child screaming from migraines gets smothered, because there is no uncle or aunt or silverback male to come take the baby away for playtime, so Mom can get a break. Mothers who have to fly can't leave the children home -- they're forced to take the kids on planes, where the same badly-pressured cabins that make us grownups squint and blow out our noses just damage the poor little buggers' eardrums. I want to feel sympathy -- really -- but kids scream for a REASON. They're in PAIN. And it's the industrial revolution's Nuclear Family that has left mothers in this postion.

The Nuclear Family -- it kills kids.

And they're down on gay marriage? At least gay people usually have a network of friends.

Tuesday, May 04, 2004

http://www.comicbookresources.com/columns/index.cgi?column=litg

Okay. That's going to be out of date soon, so I'll post here. So take into consideration that this is about 45% wrong, so it's not bad for journalism. I wasn't even talking about Lea's kids in particular -- I was talking about parents and their kids in general. The whole shooting match. So everybody out there gets to be equal-opportunity insulted. Too bad. Parents been insulting me for YEARS. Anybody who brings up censorship insults me. Big-time. I WILL snap your face off (That's RY, of course).

"WITHOUT WALLS

GirlAMatic.com, the female-centred online comic service has had an interesting time over Donna Barr's work of late. Author of such works as "Stinz" and "Desert Peach," Donna has found new spurts of productivity and revenue in online comics.

On her weblog www.wolffood.blogspot.com, Donna described her new GirlAmatic series "Paid Home" as "Full sets of teeth knocked out, and punishment and banishment, and beatings, and submission, and oral sex with sea serpents and mixed-race mermaids. And mermen. And blackmail and sexual compulsion and drowning and sexual power games and intentional hamstringing and tormenting cripples and... It's like Sex In The City in Black, with NO sense of humor. Girlamatic is gonna frickin' love it."

Editor Lea Hernandez was a little freaked. It seems their explicitness had never gone beyond plain nudity and "Paid Home" looked like going that way. She asked Donna to put up a Warning page before viewers saw the comic in question.

Donna wasn't happy with that and moved her whole inventory to rival online comics site, ModernTales.com. In later blog entries she has decried "people with kids want the whole world to be safe for them" by locking them up and suggesting that by having children, Lea was overpopulating the planet.

My favourite line? "Just because I have a twat, doesn't mean I'm going to be their paid baby-sitter."

No wonder Donna referred to herself as GirlAMatic.com's "Company Doberman"

(Snip, out of context): "... I am clearly "selfish" and "too stupid to use a
condom" or to "keep my legs shut."

Your continuous spewing of this nonsensical screed is ugly, unprofessional
and downright embarrassing. The irony is that you are throwing an even
bigger, more hateful tantrum than any of the "poop-machines" you complain
about.

Grow up."

See? These parents think that the rest of us are supposed to put up with the result of their breeding, and lose their minds the moment one of us says we have had it with the kids.

I've tried to warn them that there is a reason that funding for schools is disappearing. Those of us without children are supporting the raising of children through our taxes -- and getting no balanced benefits in return.

I've tried to warn them that they can't use their kids as an excuse to run the rest of our lives -- and that a backlash is coming that may remove funding and special treatment from them, as the number of people not having kids increases. I mean, these parents care so little about the health of other people around them, they throw sewage-laden diapers into our landfills, by the ton. I'm wincing at the thought of the cholera epidemic when one of these toxic masses bursts out into a city's water source. Or worse. I mean, jeeze, we HAVE sewer systems -- you'd think a parent would take on the responsiblity of washing their own diapers in the toilet, instead of throwing them into the restroom waste paper can, or the city garbage can. EWWWWWW....

But there's something about being a parent that closes off all ability to see what somebody else's life may be like. They automatically assume you not only like their kids, but you want them in your life -- and you want them to run your life. They shut off their ears and minds to any consequences of any of their actions. Other people put up with them for years and years -- but we're starting to crack. Let's hope that blowing off our impatience on the BLogs will be enough.

But you do know the difference between the conservative and liberal mind-sets:

Conservative: "I know better than you!"

Liberal (about a year later): "I TOLD you so..."

"Grow up?"

I will not. Not ever. Kicking and screaming before that ever happens. If I did, I could BECOME the kind of person who SAYS that! As though any of us wretched monkeys on this planet ever grows up. Please.

More snips from a list, re German Army reforms over the centuries (we talk about everything on that list):

Me: "And I already know a lot of those, and I think people should be
enlightened, and DO tell, C....And tell us why the GErman army was not
allowed to vote, when their wives WERE.)"

C: "Oh no, I think you should tell that part of the story... particularly as
I've never heard of this!"

Me: "After World War One, it was decided (NOT by the Nazis -- by well meaning Generals with WAY too many degrees in philosophy -- it's weird how many German Army officers had degrees in philosophy) that the German Army had to be completely apolitical. Yes, there is a description from Frau Rommel of her and Rommel sitting down and seriously discussing what they were going to do with their ONE vote -- because as a member of the Army, Rommel wasn't allowed to vote.

That particular country has since realized the error of keeping the military politically ignorant and powerless.

Think the US will ever catch up? And while we're at it -- give its troops a full education about the Geneva Conventions...

(Later on, Rommel wasn't allowed to have a pilot's license because he was not a member of the Nazi party -- but you think that stopped him?)"

And then one of the list members asked, "Why should we have a military that is politically knowledgeable, when we don't have a people that is?"

Thank you fricking corporate goons of the 30's for what they did to education in America.

Monday, May 03, 2004

You know, I just realized that, if you have kids, I get to tell you how to raise them.

I, after all, as a childless person, am being taxed to support the little buggers. But that's not really a complaint with me. After all, you help to support my roads and ferry system and -- big laugh -- health care (if it weren't a complete fantasty, that is). So if you need help with the education of your rug-rats, I can see it as a payoff to society in general. Shake hands. Peace.

However, I am not going to endure it if you decide that you get to tell me how to behave, just because you let somebody put a penis in you, and you were too dumb to wear a condom. And yes, I'm talking to My People now -- the women. Men are too dumb to talk to -- I've given up trying to get my head around how little they are capable of understanding (this does not include my few male friends are are really as smart as women, and you know who you are).

But back to my fellow bitches --

What told you that you get to be Behavior Nazi, the moment you pooped out a rugrat to add to the human infestation on this planet? And at 6 billion people, it's not a population, it's an infestation. You get to tell me that I have to censor what I do? I'm the adult in this equation. Since when does your spawn get the right to supervise my freedom of speech?

Just because I decided I didn't want to add to the burden of humanity and wasn't so selfish I had to have a little live doll all my own, or had to verify my worth because I could breed -- a cat can breed -- I'm supposed to let you run my life?

I'm supposed to walk into public restrooms and find you with your damp naked monkey splayed out on the floor, nasty baby-shit all over the place, and I'm supposed to go around you? I'm supposed to sit back while you throw those filthy diapers into the landfills? Filling my ground-water up with human parasites and bacteria and viruses? Since when did our landfills become sewers for your poop-machines?

If somebody gave me the option to say where my taxes went, I'd set up a fund to have you fixed. Because you are obviously too dumb not to keep opening your legs for the ingress of sperm, or the exit of meat.

ADOPT, if you have to have these things. And keep them the hell away from me, at least until they are old enough to eat without drooling, or to pay attention to the point that I don't have to pick them up and throw them to get them not to act like the stupid little monkeys they are.

Who wants to form a club? Cannibal Aunts Of America. Or of the Fricking World.